Monday, November 8, 2010

After a long break we've started up the Sunday Pathfinder game again. I of course always call it "D&D" and I don't feel bad about it. We kicked some ass, took some land, made some sort of peace with the local centaur folk, and almost got murdered by some sort of flying soul-stealing cloud... thing. Also, I did something that kinda disturbs me.

I have this thing, when playing in these games, where my character always tries, and fails, to win over some random female NPC. My character is on the singles scene, as am I in real life, and so when he isn't chopping a goblin in the groin with his axe he's at the tavern buying some pretty lady drinks. Julian, my current axe-wielding maniac, fancies this ex-witch living in our settlement. Only, she hates him. In fact, I think that's how it pretty much always goes with my characters and women (and that sort of applies to real life as well). And that's fine; it's just a game, and the women I send my characters after are like the unclimbable mountain, that certain unattainable something that keeps them going ever onward. Only last night I had Julian murder that woman.

I guess I just got tired of her. I piled gold at her feet and she spit on me. It was, as it usually is, a gag I play every week, "what stupid thing can I try this time that is certain to end in failure with this fake fantasy woman". But I guess even a fake fantasy man can only take so much, and being an axe-wielding maniac it only makes sense that he would attack such emotions with the same bloodthirsty gusto that gets him through that mob of spiders or that giant undead cyclops. So Julian buried her alive in an unmarked grave. By which I mean, I had my character do this crime. And it was funny! We all laughed, because it's a game, and none of it is real, and none of us would ever dream of doing something like that in real life! In essence my actions were little more than crumpling up a piece of paper with a name and numbers on it and throwing it in the garbage. Only maybe there was some ketchup on that paper that made my brain think of blood, or something like that scary-realistic sounding painful yelp when you kill a dog in Fallout: New Vegas, and you know you didn't really kill anything but it just tugs at your heart in just the right way.

Today at work I was telling my non-gaming coworkers about this, and coming out of my mouth it all just seemed so very, very wrong. Like I had confessed to murder! And I kept thinking "man they must think I'm some sorta psychopath over here!". But no, that actually interested them in the game more so than any other story I've told them. They thought it was hilarious. And of course so do I, as I have a very morbid sense of humor and enough wits about me to know fantasy from reality. There's just something there, that I can't quite describe, that has left this weird vibe in me all day. Weirdest game night ever.

Also as if you didn't already think me disturbed and crazy, I tried to get the group to cast Speak with Dead on a tanned centaur skin that I had sewn into a sort of sock puppet because I thought it might know where the missing townsfolk went. You know, hero stuff.